1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of software and, more particularly, to Web portals.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many Web sites utilize portals, which are anchor Web pages used as entry points or gateways to network accessible information. The Web in its broadest sense being the universe of network-accessible information including the resources and users on the Internet which are communicatively linked via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and related protocols. In this context, a portal can include one or more containers, called portlets, within which externally derived content can be placed. The external data is often a segment of markup extracted from an external Web page and accessed via an Internet link.
Portals can have the ability to present information in a variety of formats, each format targeted for a particular context. For example, if a Web browser is accessing a portal, the portal can present information as an HTML (hypertext markup language) document. Alternately, if a Web-enabled personal data assistant (PDA) is accessing a portal, the portal can present information as a WML (wireless markup language) document. Similarly, a portal with voice access capabilities can audibly present information from a VoiceXML extensible document or other voice enabled markup document.
Conventional portals are generally optimized for visual presentations using a Web browser of a personal computer. When such portals are formatted for a different context, a cumbersome and/or confusing presentation can result. For example, content presented through an audio interface commonly is presented in the same order and/or manner as when the content is presented through a visual interface. More specifically, conventional portals audibly present portlets from left-to-right and from top to bottom. Further, tables and other structures within portlets are typically accessed columns first from left-to-right and then by row from top-to-bottom.
Additionally, particular portals may not be renderable for all contexts. For instance, a portlet containing a video may be properly rendered in a personal computer (PC) context but not properly rendered in a mobile context. Further, users accessing the portal in a voice context, such as a telephone, should not be presented with visually oriented portlets.
Presently, no portal framework exists which allows a portal administrator to specify different presentation attributes, such as order and/or enablement, in a context specific manner. One possible solution to providing context-dependent Web pages has been to construct multiple portals, each tailored for a particular context. This solution is costly as each of these portals has an associated development and maintenance cost, which can be substantial.